USA-CA (United States of America Counties Award) - Presented by CQ Magazine for working and verifying USA counties in increments of 500 up to 3000 and a special award for all 3077 counties. I have the award for 1500 counties mixed bands/CW and 500 counties for 40 meters. Many of the contacts for those awards were from the 60's when I operated 75W. Over the years I have gone through different ways of counting my counties. For a while I did not count portables or mobiles and my awards were earned with only home stations. Now with the relaxed portable operating rules it is very hard to determine if a station is at home or portable, so I have pretty much given up on that method of working counties. Now I have my totals split into two main groups. One group only for my QRP contacts, and one for my overall QRP and QRO contacts. For both groups I count home, portable, and mobile stations I work. At any rate, at present I am not working all that hard in any method of increasing my county totals, merely taking them as they come.

MARAC offers a CW Worked All Counties Award. This award has a great feature compared to the USA-CA award. No confirmations are required! This to cut down on the ever growing cost of county hunting. MARAC also offers many other county awards to both members and non-members.

If you're interested in learning how WA8EOH and I started the CW County Hunters Net in 1966, the net history is in my County Hunting section.

My current county totals by state are (blue indicates a complete state total):